The Anglican Inter Faith Commission was requested by the Primates at their meeting in Canterbury 2016, then presented to the Anglican Consultative Council in 2016 in Lusaka (resolution 16.10) and launched at the Primates Meeting in Canterbury in October 2017.

I bring you greetings from the wider Anglican Communion; and they are real greetings in the Spirit-- warm and heartfelt. You – the Church of England – can never be just one of the 38 provincial churches of the Anglican Communion. As the very word ‘anglicana’ implies, there is a living tradition of faith in the Gospel as this church has received it, from the missionary work of St Augustine of Canterbury 1,420 years ago, to the particular experience of renewal in the English Reformation and beyond.

Partnership in Mission is at the heart of relationships within both the Anglican Communion and the wider Church. The Anglican Consultative Council, meeting in Dublin in 1973, noted that while the responsibility for mission in any given place belongs primarily to the local church in that place, each part of the worldwide church also carries responsibility for mission in every other place.

The PEF was set up in 1979 by Archbishop Donald Coggan, because of the critical medical needs clergy and church workers and their families’ around the Communion were facing. Many clergy were unable to pay for treatment and in many cases their ministry suffered because of this.